Demon Copperhead (2022) is a Pulitzer prize winning novel by Barbara Kingsolver. The Pulitzer and the ebullient jacket blurbs give me confidence that a somewhat more negative review here will not do much harm.

The thing to know at the outset (which I did not know), is that Demon Copperhead is an adaptation of David Copperfield. Wikipedia is a bit too cautious in saying that “Kingsolver was inspired by the Charles Dickens novel David Copperfield.” The sequence of events and the cast of characters are imitated slavishly; the valuable parts are omitted. The result is an incoherent plot that offers nothing to the reader but voyeuristic descriptions of sexual activity and drug abuse.

Why it fails as an adaptation

Kingsolver has particular emphasis on the names: each one has been adapted so as to… well, each one has been adapted, anyway. The upshot of this is that you get about 200 milliseconds of pleasure from making the connection in your head (“Oh, Angus is Agnes!”), and then a sinking feeling as you realize that you now know exactly what that character’s story arc will be. This is iconic of the failure of the novel as a whole: painful attention to detail, complete neglect of any larger theme.

Stories can be adapted successfully. Till We Have Faces retells the Cupid and Psyche myth. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi retells Beowulf. Two Gentlemen of Verona adapts The Knight’s Tale. What these successes have in common is that they take the skeleton of the tale without committing themselves to every detail. An adapted story must be able to stand on its own even if one doesn’t know that it’s an adaptation. And the adaptation will work best if the themes (and loose plot) of the source are adapted, rather than, e.g., the names, places, and sequence of events. The line between adaptation and parody is not particularly fine, though, as I write below, it’s not clear which side Kingsolver ends up on.

What Kingsolver has chosen not to adopt is Dickens’s sense of humanity that remains despite adversity. Copperfield is a book about a series of relationships and interrelationships. There are villains (Murdstone, Heap), but there are a greater number of friends; and the friendships drive the plot. In Copperhead, the author feels obligated to follow the sequence of events of Copperfield, but since that sequence is not related to the actual events of Copperhead, the plot doesn’t work. (Or, to be more charitable, the trope “people with addiction and attachment issues make random decisions and move around a lot” does a lot of work in Copperhead.) In consequence, the plot has nothing to do with the relationships, and so it’s hard to see where the relationships matter.

The most straightforward demonstration of this is the McCobb (Micawbre) family. They are portrayed entirely unsympathetically in Kingsolver’s book, and with nothing that generates the least interest in them as characters. (Naturally, they don’t advance the plot in the least: Kingsolver was apparently just going down the list of names in the original and didn’t want to leave one out.) In Copperfield, they are not antagonists but fellow-victims of the workhouse system. And they are friends to David, even if they are not particularly helpful friends.

Or one could consider Betsy. She remains a presence in David’s life in Copperfield, but disappears in Copperhead except to reappear once to cluck her tongue, and once at the very end of the novel in a happy reunion. (Her behavior doesn’t even make sense within the narrative world of Copperhead. Why does Betsy take such care to provide for Demon and then immediately lose interest? Why is it left to every other character to help Demon? Why is it anything but a matter of indifference to be reunited with him at the end of the novel?) The Peggots (Pegotty) are likewise only really on the scene early in the book; we get occasional updates thereafter, but the relationship as such is non-existent. And even the characters in Copperhead that treat Demon well really have no real relationship with him. We get updates about what happens to Maggot, but Demon and Maggot never once have a significant interaction.

Excursus: is Kingsolver just messing with us?

The really vexing question for interpretation is whether Kingsolver isn’t in fact writing ironically. Could she have intended some sort of social consciousness judo? “Look, reader, how readily you read and celebrated this ridiculous book, just because it confirmed your existing prejudices. Look on your sense of literary taste and feel ashamed!” I would almost prefer to believe this.

At one point the narrator — who has not otherwise been represented as a reader a great (or any) books — offers this praise for a Dickens novel (presumably Copperfield).

Likewise the Charles Dickens one, seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but [profanity] did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat’s ass. You’d think he was from around here.

Now, there are two scenarios in which a sentence like this makes sense. Scenario 1 is that Demon is a redneck who doesn’t understand what he’s reading, and this sentence is written with that characterization. Scenario 2 is that Kingsolver didn’t understand Dickens at all, assuming somehow that he wrote “message” novels. (One can just imagine the pearl-clutching 19th century readers exclaiming to themselves, “Upon my word, being poor doesn’t sound pleasant at all!” — and then eagerly awaiting the next installment to find out if being poor becomes any more pleasant.)

Now some read and remember Dickens primarily for his social criticism. That is certainly present in his books. But it exists alongside of an actual plot: he shows real people struggling in the economic world of 19th century London. The struggle is there but it is not all that is there. Kingsolver, or Kingsolver-as-Demon, seems not to understand this. Aside from certain details that are mimicked in Copperhead, one would really think that Kingsolver had seen references to Dickens as a social critic, read the Wikipedia page on Copperfield, and then set pen to paper. It’s frustrating to think how great a book set in Appalachia that took people seriously as people (and as moral agents) could have been.

Against scenario 1 and in favor of scenario 2, we have this sentence from the acknowledgments:

I’m grateful to Charles Dickens for writing David Copperfield, his impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society. Those problems are still with us.

So on the balance, my judgment is that the election of 2020 prompted a bit of a victory lap over the benighted hicks responsible for the election of 2016. (I have no idea whether this is true: but the book was published in 2022, and it’s hard to believe that it would take more than a couple of months or a year to write this kind of novel.)

Why it fails as a novel

The most glaring fault of the novel is the lack of a coherent authorial voice. How old is the author? It’s impossible to tell.* Rueful reflections of the inadequacy of the Department of Social Services are put into the mouth of a ten-year-old. The narrator has the self-awareness to both narrate and comment on the oddity of his mother’s discussing the hotness of her new boyfriend with him as a primary schooler. But then the narrator climbs back into the ten-year-old persona to represent childish hero-worship of an older friend, the excitement of Christmas morning, or delight over a new jacket. And then within pages the eleven-year-old is converging on a mature personal evaluation of his drug-addicted mother. Similarly, we all chuckle when the characters say “geographic dome” instead of “geodesic dome” — “ha, ha, the poor bumpkins only know one word that starts with geo-” — but the narrator makes the same mistake, and then observes that it’s hard to describe how a dome can be made out of triangles. Setting aside whether that is in fact difficult to describe: could an adult narrator not have come up with “like at Epcot in Florida”? The lack of a consistent authorial perspective grates constantly.

* The narrator is described as a freshman in high school in 2001. We’re then entitled to guess that he is in his thirties when the books was published in 2022. Alternately, the last line of the novel sort of implies that the entire narration occurred when he is in his early twenties, on his way to the beach.

It’s worth considering how Dickens handled the narrator. The narrator of David Copperfield is apparently an older man writing his memoirs at the close of a long and successful career. He relates his childish perceptions, and allows those to color the narrative, but the narrator himself retains a mature (and omniscient) perspective. So for instance when the conversation between Murdstone and his friends takes place, Copperfield narrates the exchange by both giving the literal words, and by representing David’s ignorance of their meaning. Kingsolver apes the same scene, but it makes no sense, because the narrator freely interprets the adult world in a mature way both before and after the scene.

The plot of the novel is distorted by Kingsolver’s commitment to two poverty tropes: 1) as discussed above, that poor people don’t have meaningful relationships, and 2) that they are all druggies and sexual libertines.

For the latter, we can observe none of the sexual exploits of the characters contribute meaningfully to the plot, save for one pregnancy. (This is by far the trashiest book I’ve ever read.) Why is the childish love of Demon/Emily (David/Em’ly) is sexualized in Copperhead? Because they’re impoverished rednecks, and that’s how poor people behave. None of the sex even creates an emotional connection, so it is entirely gratuitous. And the focus on sex forces Kingsolver into strange contortions. In Copperfield, the David/Agnes relationship begins as sibling affection. That’s not even a possible category in Kingsolver’s hypersexualized novel, so the only way to head off an immediate sexual relationship between the two is to portray Angus (Agnes) as unattractive and androgynous. And by the inverse of the same logic, Emily (Em’ly) must meet with a degradation far beyond pre-marital sex, since the latter would be merely par for the course.

Concerning the drug use, what can one say? Demon’s drug addiction is just there in the background. It’s constantly referred to but doesn’t move the plot forward at all. He uses drugs in foster care, uses drugs as a football star, and uses drugs as a drop-out. It would be nice if there had been some event that had occurred because of his addiction, or some event that didn’t occur because of his addiction. But because the sequence of events is just the white-trash version of the events of Copperfield, there is no role for addiction to play in the plot.

At two or three points in the narrative, characters complain about all of the stereotypes about Appalachian people, saying how hurtful and inaccurate they are. This, in a book that is nothing but a laundry list of every trope about Appalachia that you’ve ever heard. (This again causes one to ask: is it tonedeafness, or is Kingsolver just messing with us?)

Kingsolver subverts expectation (the white-savior trope) by sending an inspirational Black teacher from Chicago into the rural areas to give students a new perspective. And then she subverts expectation again by making that message that the students have no agency, and that their fates were determined by the decisions of corporations generations before they were born. This latter irony, I believe, was unintentional. Because the identical analysis is propounded (in the context of the opioid epidemic) by the only really admirable character in the novel, June. The line, I believe, was: “They did this to you.”

So we end up with a disempowering message, set in an un-plotted world, where Kingsolver’s only real symbolic contribution is this: Appalachia is a hell-hole in which no redemption is possible. The only successful adult in the novel (June), succeeded by leaving Appalachia. And then lost her adopted daughter to drugs when she decided (incomprehensibly) to return. Demon achieves recovery only when he leaves the area. The hopeful end of the novel involves him simply driving away from the region. Throughout, movement away from Appalachia means progress, and movement toward Appalachia means death.

I eagerly await the sequel.